I watched The Gadget Show, the other week and they had a contest between Jason and Suzie to see who would manage the quicker and better online exposure of their videos.
Suzie got a Viral Marketing campaign for which she probably paid an arm and a leg, whereas Jason went down the cheaper route utilising social media channels. The aim was to find out who would get essentially the bigger amount of hits.
I thought this was a great case study for a social media campaign, which is now more and more used by SEOs as part of their link building and/or brand exposure strategies.
Suzie used the a big viral advertising company to create a short viral game “Suzie says” and a short movie to help build the brand “Suzie Perry”. They embrased the not so new “sex sells” approach, were Suzie is seen in the background getting changed, however nothing is ever revealed, as a mobile phone covers the important bits. Watch the Suzie Perry video.
Jason took the low budget approach utilising the Web 2.0 social media options, which are available to everyone at no cost.
He filmed the “Extreme Caterpillar Breakdance” and placed it on various social networking sites, social bookmarking sites and of course on You Tube and other video domains, such as Break.com and Spike.
Social bookmarking sites included Facebook. The social bookmarking sites were Stumble Upon and Digg.
The results were quite different.
Suzie’s campaign only achieved 127,716 views on YouTube, contrary to Jason’s “Extreme Caterpillar” movie, which received 2,876,874 views.
This shows the power of social media and ought to be part of any good SEO campaign. Of course it’s important to identify which social media strategy is most relevant to a client and a page on Facebook and a YouTube movie may just not always be the most effective.
